Hackaday At Maker Faire

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If you are planning your trip to Maker Faire Bay Area — May 17th and 18th — why not hunt down the Hackaday crew? We’ll be packing a ton of swag to give out to anyone who asks for it. But ideally we’d like to show off the best hardware we can find so don’t come empty-handed!

Want your Maker Faire stuff featured on Hackaday? You can Tweet in advance to let us know when you’ll be there and what you’re bringing. You can also track us down during the weekend as we’ll be frequently Tweeting our locations. Here is the contact list and information on some festivities we’re planning:

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Floreo: E-textililes And Moving Clothing

pedul [Alica] and [Jerika] are seniors in the Digital Culture program at Arizona State University and for their capstone, the wanted to take something that is traditionally male dominated and make it more female friendly. They chose e-textiles, which are most commonly extremely avant garde and nearly unapproachable with a lot of LEDs and zany mechanisms. Their initial designs reflected this, with multiple LED strips and huge shoulder pads. Then they discovered Flexinol shape memory actuator wire, and found this could be a much ‘softer’ integration of technology with haute couture.

[Jerika] and [Alica] chose to create an electronic flower, able to bloom with the help of a shape memory alloy. When a current is applied to the Flexinol wire, it contracts. Sewing these wires into laser cut fabric petals, the girls created a fabric flower that booms with the help of an LiliPad Arduino.

While they weren’t able to complete their dress due to electronic weirdness and burning out the wire too soon, they did succeed in creating a flower pin that demonstrated the intended effect.

Videos below.

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DIY Arduino Cases You Never Knew Existed

There are sure a lot of varieties of Arduinos out there but there may even be more of a variety when it comes to Arduino Cases. Let’s take the most popular Arduino form factor, the Uno. Below are a handful of unique cases for the Uno-sized boards.

 

by [Megaduty], Arduino Protection Box beefy arduino case

We’ll call this one robust. Although it is 3D printed, its intent is to be extremely protective of the inhabitant. Some extra thought went into this case, no tools are needed! After the Arduino snaps into place, so does the cover. There is an access door to get the input/output wires to the free world. [Megaduty] suggests that this contains $0.10 of plastic. Not a bad deal.

 

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Hackaday Meetup With HeatSync Labs And The Tymkrs

 

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We know a lot of hackers will be heading to Maker Faire next weekend. If you find yourself passing through Mesa, AZ on your way or you’re a local hacker enthusiast then please feel compelled to drop by HeatSync Labs on May 15th between the hours of 5pm and 9pm for an informal gathering. You will get to meet HeatSync Labs hackerspace members and The Tymkrs (Whiskers and Addie) who are founders of The Rabbit Hole hackerspace in Rochester, Minnesota. Sorry for the late notice, I thought it would be a great opportunity to organize an impromptu hacker meetup in order to include The Tymkrs as they pass through town on their epic summer road trip.

If people have a project or photos of a project they’re working on I would enjoy hearing all about it and I’m sure others would as well. I’m looking forward to visiting everyone that can attend!

For those who show up early there should be plenty of pizza, soda and Hackaday swag to go around. I’d like to thank the members of HeatSync Labs for kindly letting me schedule a Hackaday style meetup at their hackerspace on such short notice. There will be some food and drink so don’t be too late or you might go hungry.

Meetup address: HeatSync Labs 140 West Main St. Downtown Mesa, AZ

 

Raspberry Pi Boiler Control Uses A Webcam To Read The Analog Gauge

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One of the biggest problems with home automation is trying to interface with old or analog devices. Do you upgrade the device just so you can automate it? Or do you find a workaround like [Seb] did?

[Seb] doesn’t have on-demand hot water, and as such has to turn on his boiler if he wants to have a hot bath or shower. Not very convenient having to wake up an hour early in the morning just to turn the boiler on so he can have a morning shower! Nonplussed with having to continue putting up with this, he decided to try his hand at home automation using a Raspberry Pi.

The problem is there’s no easy way to have feedback on what the boiler is doing — sure he can turn it on and off using a mains relay with the Pi’s GPIO, but how can he easily measure the temperature inside the boiler?

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Augmented Laser Cutter Removes Design Technology Barriers

augmented laser

Laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers — they’re all great technology in the right hands, but unfortunately the learning curve sometimes puts would-be makers at a distance.  [Anirudh] from MIT’s Media Lab is attempting to break down at least one of those barriers with his augmented laser cutter system called, Clearcut.

The system consists of a webcam, a projector, and a semi transparent work space on top of the laser cutter. By placing objects on the surface, the webcam can identify them, duplicate them with the projector, and then laser engrave them. In addition to the “copy and paste” idea of this, you can also use infrared emitting pens to physically draw your design on the work surface to be engraved. It starts to bridge the gap between complex CAD and pencil and paper, something anyone is capable of.

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GPIB To USB, With A Python API

If you’re not so daft as to think Arduino-based oscilloscopes and multimeters are actually useful for all but the simplest tests and measurements, you just might have some big iron sitting around your workbench from the likes of HP, or Tektronix. You might have noticed a strange port on the back of these machines, labeled GPIB or IEEE-488. This is the standard interface for these devices, and if you’ve ever priced out a USB to IEEE-488 converter, you can see why [Steven] thought it would be cheaper to build his own.

This build is an update to an earlier version we saw a few years ago. Since then, [Steven] has taken some advice from the community and replaced a bunch of resistors with proper GPIB line driver ICs, and generally cleaned up the firmware.

Because a USB to GPIB adapter is only one small part of the tools necessary to connect these old measurement devices to a modern computer, [Steven] has also been working on InstrumentKit. It’s a Python library that takes all the standardized instrument commands and wraps them up in an easy to use API. You can check out the docs for InstrumentKit here, or just look through the board files and firmware on the Github